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income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business.
    The children, then, could look after themselves.
    He and his wife would be off soon with the jewel-boxes of the moneylender’s women. It was a timely chance indeed that had brought the beautiful bruised girl into his corner of the town.
    That night, the large house on the shore of the lake lay blindly waiting, with silence lapping at its walls. A burglar’s night: clouds in the sky and mists on the winter water. Hashim the moneylender was asleep, the only member of his family to whom sleep had come that night. In another room, his son Atta lay deep in the coils of his coma with a blood-clot forming on his brain, watched over by a mother who had let down her long greying hair to show her grief, a mother who placedwarm compresses on his head with gestures redolent of impotence. In a third bedroom Huma waited, fully dressed, amidst the jewel-heavy caskets of her desperation.
    At last a bulbul sang softly from the garden below her window and, creeping downstairs, she opened a door to the bird, on whose face there was a scar in the shape of the Nastaliq letter sín.
    Noiselessly, the bird flew up the stairs behind her. At the head of the staircase they parted, moving in opposite directions along the corridor of their conspiracy without a glance at one another.
    Entering the moneylender’s room with professional ease, the burglar, Sín, discovered that Huma’s predictions had been wholly accurate. Hashim lay sprawled diagonally across his bed, the pillow untenanted by his head, the prize easily accessible. Step by padded step, Sín moved towards the goal.
    It was at this point that, in the bedroom next door, young Atta sat bolt upright in his bed, giving his mother a great fright, and without any warning – prompted by goodness knows what pressure of the blood-clot upon his brain – began screaming at the top of his voice:
    ‘Thief! Thief! Thief!’

    It seems probable that his poor mind had been dwelling, in these last moments, upon his own father; but it is impossible to be certain, because having uttered these three emphatic words the young man fell back upon his pillow and died.
    At once his mother set up a screeching and a wailing and a keening and a howling so earsplittingly intense that they completed the work which Atta’s cry had begun – that is, her laments penetrated the walls of her husband’s bedroom and brought Hashim wide awake.
    Sheikh Sín was just deciding whether to dive beneath the bed or brain the moneylender good and proper when Hashim grabbed the tiger-striped swordstick which always stood propped up in a corner beside his bed, and rushed from the room without so much as noticing the burglar who stood on the opposite side of the bed in the darkness. Sín stooped quickly and removed the vial containing the Prophet’s hair from its hiding-place.
    Meanwhile Hashim had erupted into the corridor, having unsheathed the sword inside his cane. In his right hand he held the weapon and was waving it about dementedly. His left hand was shaking the stick. A shadow came rushing towards him through the midnight darkness of the passageway and, in his somnolentanger, the moneylender thrust his sword fatally through its heart. Turning up the light, he found that he had murdered his daughter, and under the dire influence of this accident he was so overwhelmed by remorse that he turned the sword upon himself, fell upon it and so extinguished his life. His wife, the sole surviving member of the family, was driven mad by the general carnage and had to be committed to an asylum for the insane by her brother, the city’s Deputy Commissioner of Police.
    Sheikh Sín had quickly understood that the plan had gone awry.
    Abandoning the dream of the jewel-boxes when he was but a few yards from its fulfilment, he climbed out of Hashim’s window and made his escape during the appalling